


Will There Be Light And Sound (Or Will It Be Just Me?)

by azul_ora



Category: Primeval
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, Asexual aromantic character, Backstory, Cannibalism, Child Neglect, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Foreshadowing, Gen, Heavy Angst, How Do I Tag, I am not kidding Matt is seriously screwed up, I am not subtle, Lets add a few more, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Sheesh we're really going heavy on the warnings with this one, Suicide Attempt, but he does eventually get better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-16 04:07:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11820891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azul_ora/pseuds/azul_ora
Summary: She coughs up blood and it sprays against Matt’s closed eyes. He opens them and there is nothing.He focuses on the mission.





	Will There Be Light And Sound (Or Will It Be Just Me?)

**Author's Note:**

> **PLEASE READ**  
>  Warnings for malnutrition/starvation, parental neglect, child soldiers, violent death, grieving, cannibalism, emotional abuse, severe PTSD and panic attacks, emotional suppression, unhealthy coping mechanisms, self-harm, suicidal ideation and a suicide attempt.

He is born in blood and pain and the scent of metal and cloying air. His mother is bleeding, bleeding, bleeding and she doesn't stop bleeding until she's nothing but a corpse. His father does not give him a name. Someone else does. He is small and scrawny and does not have the energy to cry.

The group is constantly moving from bunker to bunker: there’s no stability, no permanence, there’s no happy childhood memories of a favourite room. His father has bigger things on his mind than a young child, so he learns to walk and talk from the same soldiers that gave him his name.

He’s constantly malnourished: they barely have enough food to keep the group alive and he’s still growing, still getting taller and larger day by day. His frame doesn’t fill out, though, and he remains gangly and too-thin, skin stretched tight, ribs visible. He doesn’t know what the word ‘hungry’ means. He’s always hungry.

He’s ten when his father starts to care about him, but that’s only because he’s realised that he’s going to need a candidate for the anomaly project years younger than himself, and his son fits the bill.

That’s when his name is taken from him and he becomes Matthew. His father (Gideon, now) tells him he has to learn to respond to Matthew because that will be his cover name when he goes back. The only solidarity he’s ever had, the one thing he thought this world could never take, his name (and it was _his_ , it was his _own_ name, no-one else in the group had his name) is gone like a breath of air. His name before, they said it meant ‘peace’. 'Matthew' means ‘gift of God’. His father says he will save them all, and Matt (he cannot think of himself as Matthew, for this is a godforsaken world so why should he be God's gift?) just wants his old name back. He doesn’t want to save the world. He just wants to be peace.

His father starts teaching him how to fight as soon as he passes twelve. He trains with fists and knives and guns and scrap bits of metal from bunker walls caved in. He’s skinny and exhausted and he learns that your enemy doesn't care if you haven't slept in days, they will still try to tear you apart. His father tries to show him how to beat the world away.

When he’s thirteen, his father takes him up to the surface for the first times. The breathing apparatus is heavy and cumbersome and the mask is stained with blood. Matt learns that the sky is yellow and the world will choke the air from your lungs given half the chance. He asks where they are and his father says that it was once called Ireland. He says that up north, there are islands that used to be called Orkney, that used to be part of Scotland, and there are no predators up there, not yet. Matt tries to imagine a world without predators, but he can’t.

He’s fourteen when he first joins the group’s militia. He kills his first predator two months later. His father claps him on the back and says he’s doing well, and Matt feels sick at the sight of the emaciated dead thing - dead by his hand, dead because of him. He doesn’t want to kill.

They eat well that night. Matt's still hungry.

He’s sick almost constantly, with fevers and colds and shivers that wrack his body but leave him eventually. He survives illness after illness while his friends die of those selfsame illnesses all around him. He doesn’t know what it is that lets him survive while they succumb to sweating and coughing and sicknesses that make your skin peel off and shred your insides. In the end it always comes back to the coughing. The air is poisoned and their lungs can only take it for so long. The entire world is living on borrowed time. It's only so long before the sands and toxic winds tear away your breath and leave you choking on your own insides. The oldest person in the group is thirty-four. Matt learns it’s easier not to get attached. Everyone goes, and most do it in blood and pain, and he can’t afford to have his heart broken anymore.

(His best friend Emily is mauled by a predator right in front of him, two days before his sixteenth birthday. He shoots the predator, but it’s too late, far too late. Her stomach spills out onto the floor and he can see the trembling in tendons as they tear in two. She dies in his arms and he promises that he’ll put this right, that he’ll take the broken parts of this dying world and sweep them up till they fit together again. She coughs up blood and it sprays against Matt's closed eyes. He opens them and there is nothing.

He focuses on the mission.

Emily's bloodstain is never cleaned from the floor, and they abandon that bunker a few months later when the small beetles tunnel into into Third Corridor and claim six lives. Matt manages to kill them by setting half the bunker aflame. Later, he looks at the burnt shell of the huge one and makes a mental note for later - they follow the queen.)

On the year's anniversary of Emily's death, Matt finds an locket in a box in one of the old abandoned shelters. The engraving reads  _To Emily, deceased._ He wonders what Emily it was first made for. There is a supernova of pain in the word  _deceased_. He puts it on and does not take it off. It is the only way he can honour her memory, now. He wakes on his birthday with the taste of tears on his lips and cold metal against his chest. He kisses it and wonders if the grief will ever stop.

(Sometimes, it's easier just to feel nothing. He keeps telling himself that.)

A year later, Gideon shows him the map of the anomalies the week before they’re due to go through, and he quickly memorises it. The anomaly to the Permian opens and Matt steps into a world that’s not quite as harsh as his own. There are creatures here but they are nothing to the predators and the huge burrowing bugs that steal people and the small beetles that tear through three feet of steel in seconds and kill _kill **kill-**_

They travel for three weeks through the Permian, and then wait for two more days before the anomaly to the twenty-first century opens. A Gorgonopsid goes through before they do, but that’s not their problem - they're here to save the world, not the creatures of the past. They come out in a forest and it’s the most beautiful thing Matt's ever seen. Gideon coughs blood into the greenery.

Three days after they’ve arrived, Matt turns eighteen. A day after that, the news says that a woman called Helen Cutter vanished into the forest on the day they arrived. Matt remembers the Gorgonopsid and hopes she died swiftly.

Gideon finds easy work and makes both of them fake ID. Matthew Anderson, his birth certificate says, and he thinks, _I was born peace, I was not born to save the world_. He takes it and gets a driver’s license, a credit card, all the things of this world. The novelty of a small piece of plastic holding such value is strange and brilliant. He'd heard stories of money, of course, but to actually see people treat scraps of plastic and paper as though they mean something is wonderful and bizarre all at once.

The first time he sees a supermarket, he starts crying unashamedly, ducking into a side alley so that no-one will see him sob at all that food, all that light, all that _hope._

The Army in this strange new (old) world is just as eager for recruits as in Matt's own, and despite the fact that by the standards of this new place he is unbelievably thin, he is a good fighter, and he enlists. It takes some time for his body to adapt to the food of the past, but once he does, he builds muscle and fat quickly, finally filling out his frame. The day comes when he can no longer count his ribs simply by looking at them, and he smiles.

Two months after he's first enlisted, Gideon is forced to go into care. Years of toxic winds have taken their toll: he is succumbing to the same bloodying of the lungs that claimed the lives of so many of Matt's friends. Clean air and clean water and good food will extend his life, the nurses say, but they think he will survive but another twelve years or so. All apologetic, as though this is some great injustice.

In twelve years time, Gideon will be forty-seven.

Matt is sent abroad for two years and fights and hates it, hates it with every atom of his being, and finally he gets to come back. He leaves the Army and spends his time learning instead, starting at school-level education and building up quickly. Some things, he knows lots about (technology, for example: building it, repairing it and programming it): others, he knows nothing at all (the theoretical sciences). He needs to be perfect. He needs to know everything he can, if he wants to save the world.

(He wants peace.)

He learns and learns and learns, and works while he does. This world is soft and simple and easy: the work-week here is nothing to the always-paranoia of twenty-hour shifts listening for the clack-clack-clack of predators, waiting for death incarnate to come creeping past your door. Matt still dreams of orange skies and bloodstained floors. His apartment is like a palace and he thinks,  _kings and rulers and emperors brought this world crashing down_. The things of the past (future) have taken root inside his mind, the burrowing beetles nesting in the empty corridors of his brain, in the place where love should be.

Someone tells him happiness will find its way in and he smiles. It does not reach his eyes or his heart. Happiness is for people, and Matt is not a person. He is a king and a ruler and an emperor, born to peace and made to save the world, or else watch it burn.

When he is recruited to the ARC, he knows in every cell in his body (nucleus, cell membrane, cytoplasm, ribosomes, mitochondria) that this is it. This is the way the world dies.

Sarah is kind and soft but there is a hardness in the way she looks sometimes, a wistful kind of sorrow that tells Matt this is someone who has known pain. Nick Cutter and Stephen Hart are practically legends in the ARC and the way Sarah speaks about Cutter makes Matt think there must have been something brilliant to him. The death of brilliance is a tragedy the whole world must mourn. He remembers reports of the vanishing of Helen Cutter and wishes he could change things, could go back and do it differently. (He does not know whether he would've stopped her, or simply killed her, knowing what he does now.)

Becker is sharp and silent from loss and pain ( _Abby, Connor_ , he tells Matt in halting words late one night when he is drunk and weeping, _they were amazing, you would've loved them_ ) and when Sarah dies something cracks inside him.

_(Do you have any new suspects, Matthew?_

_No, Father. It could be anyone at the ARC, but none of them seem likely._

_What about that Sarah girl?_

_Deceased.)_

Matt tries his best to heal him, but here they speak of maladies as though they are a tragedy and not a fact of life, not just one more way that you could lose everything you ever knew.

(Emily, Emily, Emily.

There is a supernova of pain and it's easier to feel nothing but he just wants peace he wasn't born to save the world he doesn't want to die for something so much bigger than himself.)

Becker is lonely and lovely and lethal but Matt hasn't known how to love for a very long time. Becker is no exception.

Jess is kind and sweet and everything Matt could never afford to be. He wonders, if he had grown up in a world of sunshine and starlight, whether he could be what she is. He idolises the way she can love and love and lose and simply accept it and keep going. There is a kind of strength in beauty, he thinks, there is a kind of sadness in flowers. How lovely they are, and how quickly they die.

(Jess gives a bunch of flowers to everyone in the ARC on New Year's Day, every year. The first time she hands a bouquet to Matt, he doesn't know what they're for. He's gathered by now that they're not food, so he doesn't understand. He looks it up online one she's gone. When he finds out what they mean, he wonders how one person can hold so much love, like she breathes moonlight.)

Matt wonders whether this kind of love that they speak about, this kissing and hugging and sex and spending your lives together, is really for him. They sing songs and write poems to the intricacies of romance but he feels nothing. He learns how to flirt, but never has any taste for it, and his only attempt at having sex stops when he begins to get uncomfortable the second the woman takes off her shirt. He apologises and flees from her apartment still fully clothed, shame burning its way through him like a wildfire (like a breath of toxic air that makes you cough and choke on bile and blood).

_Focus on the mission, Matthew. You cannot become attached. It could be any of them._

Sometimes, Matt hates his father.

Connor and Abby return and their faces pierce Matt like a bullet (EMD) to the chest. He's seen pictures of them before, of course, but that never quite clicked with the images that are carried in the small data chip that's tucked inside his locket.

_To Emily, deceased._

He was born to peace. Emily isn't just Emily, anymore, she is every reason he has become a king and an emperor and if he must watch the world burn he will do it in her name. He knows it is cowardly, to call upon the people of this time to bear witness to his failure and call a once-friend girl who has been dead for years and is not yet born the cause of it all, but the world is heavy and Matt can't carry the weight of what he has to do anymore.

He tries to tell Gideon as much but his father is dying faster than ever. The doctors say now that twelve years was an over-generous estimate, that he could die any day now. He is still older than any person Matt had ever known. That he still had a father at age ten, twelve, sixteen, eighteen, was a rare thing indeed. Most parents died before their children even came to understand what death was.

(Not that there were many children anymore when Matt and Gideon abandoned their sickened-sunset skies. Contaminated food and toxic water had rendered most infertile, and ever-depleting food supplies killed off most children who were born. Matt recalls sickened, half-dead things that looked like skeletons from the moment they were born and never made it out of infancy, remembers blood on the floors.

Matt recalls the people who took the dead child and sliced it up and cooked it over a small fire alongside with a dead predator.

Matt recalls how good it tasted, shame curling in his chest as he tore apart what could have been a life, once, maybe, in another world.)

When people waste food here, Matt wants to scream. They get an anomaly in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant and after they've locked and sealed the anomaly (no creature incursion, all clear here) he turns away and retches at the sight of food (perfectly good food, better than half the stuff he's eaten) rotting in a bin without a care in the world. He dry heaves for twenty minutes while Connor and Abby rub his back and Becker double-checks that the anomaly hasn't had any dramatic effect on the surroundings that could've caused this.

(He can't bring himself to explain why the sight of good food going to waste makes his stomach roil.)

He hates that he lives in a world where people think life is something that you can afford to waste.

Matt has found himself hating more and more things, lately. He hates that he still wakes up screaming some nights. He hates that he still dreams of cancerous skies and cancerous eyes and cancerous minds. He hates that he loves his father, he hates that he has devoted his life to his father's cause and still Gideon doesn't think Matt is enough, still Gideon tells him he needs to do better. He hates that he is a king and a ruler and an emperor and he tries to cling onto the fact that he was born to peace but it's slipping away. Sometimes, he looks down at his hands and sees bloodstains. He hates that he has no control, that he hasn't had any control since he was ten years old, hip-high and underfoot, when his father looked down at him and decided he was meant for more.

(He hates that even in the sanctum of his mind, he cannot bring himself to think of Becker and Abby and Connor and Jess as friends. That word has only ever meant pain.)

He hates this, and he can't stop because he needs to save the world.

(He needs peace.)

When he hears through the grapevine of gossip and whispers among the scientists that Philip is working on something huge, something curdles inside him, and he has a horrible certainty that this is it.

When he meets Emily Merchant for the first time, his hand goes to the locket around his neck and his mind goes to a bloodstain on a floor in his past and their future. He knows in a distant, detached kind of way that he's treating this Emily the way he treated  _his_ Emily but he can't bring himself to care: this (maybe-new maybe-old time-travel) girl looks much the same as his Emily, albeit a lot healthier, and every time he looks at her painfully honest face, all he can remember is quivering muscles and too much suffering for someone so young. _It's not fair_ , he cries later, sobbing into an empty room with the doors locked and the CCTV disabled so no-one will see him fall apart,  _it's not fucking fair, why can I never escape even when I run so far away that I'll never have to see that sky again I can't escape what I did and no-one there ever got to live, not really, we were all just clinging on in blood and pain and we deserved so much better._

He slams his hand into a mirror in the small room and watches his reflection shatter. There is blood on his hand and glass raining down on his skin and it feels so  _good_ , like he was numb from some inescapable cold and now he's slammed into fire and everything is burning but that's the only way to know the world is real, isn't it?

(Sunshine, starlight, moonlight. Matt hasn't known how to love for a very long time.)

He cleans and wraps his hands and pretends he got the cuts from dropping a glass at home. The others believe the lie and Matt feels something small and bright and beautiful drain out of him. They don't see him, not really. (And how could they, when he lies about who he is and where he's come from and why he's here and what a mess he's been since he was ten years old, screaming and crying as his name was taken away.)

His father dies and Matt hates that he grieves.

He knows, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, that he's not grieving for Gideon, not really. He's grieving for things that could've been and a life he never had.

(Emily, peace, flowers, brilliance, hope.)

Emily is perceptive, more so than Matt has given her credit for. Being seen for who he really is suddenly makes him feel vulnerable, like just by knowing where he's from she'll think him dangerous. (Becker's words the first time they met Emily flash through his mind. _Infectious, hostile, psychotic_. It is all too easy to reconcile those words with himself. What else has he ever been but a tragedy wrapped up in an explosion set to standby till the end of the world?) Of course she doesn't care: she is a traveler just like him, out of her time. She is no hypocrite, Matt knows that much. And then she's stepping back through a shroud of gold light, and there is a tear trickling down his cheek. He did not love her, not in the way the others thought he did, but she  _saw_ him.

It is a powerful thing, to be seen.

There is a darkness in the ARC of late. It creeps forwards, day by day, and Matt feels the heavy air suffusing into every corner until he's practically choking on it. Something is coming, something dark and terrible. King, emperor, ruler, watch the world burn.

_(The bugs take people back to their nest. There is a terrible irony in it: they have evolved to nest in structures that are already there, because that's where the people are.)_

Abby finds out.

 _To Emily, deceased_ , and pictures of a dying world. What more can he offer?

He needs to know what Connor's doing. He wants to believe that it's Philip who lives in the palace. Peace, kings, rulers, emperors, the world comes crashing down and all that's left is the pain.

(He wants peace. The world has never cared very much what Matt wants. It claws at him, demanding to be saved. What is one fractured life to billions? Life is a question of perspective. To him, one fractured life is everything, because he has let himself be stolen from him for far too long.)

Connor is  _making_ an anomaly and Matt watches in a cascade of fear as the light flickers. The guard throws the beetle back through and he's too slow, too late, not enough  _never enough-_

They pour through, and burrow through the walls of the ARC much the same way they tunnelled (will tunnel, years and years from now) through three feet of steel in seconds, the way they tunnelled into Third Corridor and claimed six lives. Matt recalls a bunker set aflame, metal too hot to touch, and knows that the queen is their only hope of winning.

After that, he just can't hide anymore. His face is a image of calm he doesn't feel as he listens to these soft flower-starlight-hope people boil eighteen years of pain and yet more of screaming memory into a single sentence.

_(So I leave you for a matter of days, and in that time, you nearly destroy the ARC and you turn out to be either a visitor from the future or, in fact - and I think this is the more likely option - clinically mad._

_The former._ _But then, I would say that if I was clinically mad, right?)_

Matt rather suspects he is both options, but that doesn't matter anymore.

Save the world or watch it burn.

_(The former.)_

He chases Connor through the anomaly and suddenly he is back in his childhood, running on dead soil and breathing toxic air and all he can think is,  _we need to get underground_.

The scariest part is that this could be his time, could be the very day he left. Could be the day he was born. He could spend his whole life running in circles just to end up within the same metal walls, breathing the same stale air and searching for clean water in ration jars. He tips Connor's head back and makes him drink and it's achingly familiar. Just another friend with bloodied lungs from poisonous winds in an orange sky. Just another person he needs to save.

Abby and Connor look at him differently, now that they know where he comes from. He allows himself to breathe, and confess.

_(You lived underground?_

_We moved from shelter to shelter, tried to avoid the storms, fought the predators. When I got to your time, I thought it was the Garden of Eden.)_

The time between those words and stumbling back through is an eternity, a supernova of pain compressed into three words.

_To Emily, deceased._

What is left of him?

He does not know.

Connor has a plan and it is crazy and almost guaranteed not to work but Matt doesn't even care anymore. A whole lifetime of pain and he thinks,  _I've suffered enough. If this doesn't work, I will be happy to watch the world burn._

_I've been doing it every day of my life, ever since I was ten years old and told I couldn't be peace anymore._

(If he could go back now, back to the day when he first stepped into this paradise, he'd slit Helen Cutter's throat in a heartbeat.)

Matt hasn't known how to love for a very long time.

The anomaly closes and the air he breathes is clean. He cannot remember wanting to survive.

He survives.

And, drowning in the aftermath, he wonders what is left.

There is no mission. There is no purpose. They know his secrets and they do not care. Oh, they care about the lies and the betrayal but they do not care about where he is from.

He thinks that perhaps it is only because they do not know what he has done.

Soon after New Dawn is dead, there is a debrief. It lasts ten hours, and they are all present for the whole thing. Becker, Jess and Lester sit to his left, and Emily, Abby and Connor are to his right. The table they sit round is circular, and there are three cameras recording the whole thing.

Matt takes a deep breath and tells them everything.

He speaks of losing his mother, then his father, then his name and then his freedom. He speaks of weapons and breathing masks and orange skies. He recalls malnutrition so severe that he appeared as a skeleton given skin. He talks about predators and burrowing bugs and beetles, and what they taste like when you bake them over a fire. He explains, in stuttering words and bitten-off sentences that stop halfway through, what they did with the bodies of the dead. The shame curls in his chest as he recalls the taste of human flesh. He averts his eyes from Emily when he speaks of the best friend that died in front of him. He touches the locket that still hangs around his neck and knows he never really learned to let her go. He continues on, talking of friends coughing up blood from the wind, or else succumbing to illnesses. He speaks of his journey back to this time. He speaks of faking credentials, of joining the Army, of learning everything he could. He describes hiding and running and trying to discover who would bring the end of all things. His voice is dull and flat when he details his self-harm, his suicide attempt, his desperate bid to save the world. He never wanted to die for something so much bigger than himself.

And at last, the broken question.  _What is left of me?_

There is silence for a few moments.

Abby rises from her chair and pulls him into a hug. His breath catches in his chest and then Emily's arms are around him, and then Connor and Becker, and he can smell Jess's perfume.

He takes a deep breath and allows himself to cry.

He does not know who is speaking, but he thinks it might be all of them.

_What is left of you, Matt, is a spirit as bright as a star and a family that loves you._

Matt has not known how to love for a very long time.

_What is left of you is the chance for a life without pain so great as what you have overcome._

Sunshine, starlight, moonlight.

_What is left of you is a group of friends who will not abandon you._

Flowers.

_What is left of you is an opportunity for redemption._

Brilliance.

_What is left of you is beautiful._

Hope.

He opens his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't own 'em - if I did, it'd be a lot more diverse.  
> The title is lyrics from the song [_In The Blind_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJXzl74-b7Y), by Area 11.  
>  Some lines have been lifted directly from the show and I do not own those lines.  
> Okay, so this was originally only meant to be a series of headcanons about Matt's childhood in the future, but it accidentally turned into his entire life story. Sue me, I have a lot of emotions about Matt.


End file.
